Did Google Just Place Three Big Bets on Nvidia?

If Google can use GPUs to provide a superior photo service, this is huge in its quest to dent Facebook's dominance.

Conclusion No. 2: It was clear that the Nvidia Shield is now Google's big play for the gaming market -- at least for this year. It is a big part of Google's plan to make Microsoft's Xbox... simply irrelevant.

Facebook

Facebook and cloud photo processing: If there ever were a thing that could show how Google can do really big things, really quickly, its reveal that it has secretly launched a new photo enhancement service certainly qualifies.

Google announced that it has employed massive cloud computing power to enhance every single photo uploaded to Google+. Seeing as this is the default photo service on Android phones, potentially up to 900 million people now have had their photo collections improved by Google.

In essence, Google's server farms now became everyone's "lazy" darkroom. Basically, when you take a photo -- let alone hundreds of them, for example coming home from vacation -- you no longer have to crop, enhance, sort and delete among them. Google has already done it for you.

How does Google do it? With GPUs, most likely. Again, Google stayed away from mention Nvidia, and I have no evidence Nvidia is a vendor here. But that's not the point. The point is that this shows the power of what GPUs can do for you in the cloud, putting otherwise idle computing power to use in terms of processing graphics-intensive tasks.

Nvidia may already be supplying Google here, or it may be doing so in the future -- or never. What is for certain is that this has inspired many players in the social and photo fields to consider this approach.